CPU consumption of DOS VM

I know that DOS systems never go idle, they just loop polling the keyboard. Parallels does not detect the situation, at least not with my Caldera DR-DOS 7.03 setup. The VM hogs one core with almost 100% busy. I know that there must be ways to detect these loops. A good implementation is the DOS VM inside OS/2. Correctly tuned, an idle DOS prompt does not use any CPU resources.

Another issue: keyboard capture. Why do I have to click in the window to have the keyboard activated. IIRC, this was not neccessary in Parallels 3. A small TSR that allows keyboard and mouse sharing in DOS would be a good idea.

 

Caldera DR-DOS 7.03 is not in the list of supported OSes

 

So the problem goes away with a different DOS? Can you make a suggestion?

 

Hi, mvcube,

The DOS which was tested and is supported - MS-DOS 6.22. Please, check this one and let us know if there are some difficulties.
Thank you.

 

FreeDOS works and it's actually free (unlike MS-DOS, which you can't buy either). And since Parallels tends to be nitpicky about licenses, they should promote FreeDOS and make Parallels compatible with it.

 

I second that! Caldera DR-DOS can be downloaded for free, too, as far as I know.

 

I am using MS DOS 6.22 within PD4 (Jan 2009 build).

My CPU usage is ok, but when I access local hard disks (images) or floppy disk (image) with Norton Diskedit, the VM slows way down. Norton Diskedit takes about 20 seconds to load and the mouse is all choppy.

There might be some small increase in CPU usage, and it is more than my Boot Camp partition when idle (now that PD4 is awesome with Windows CPU usage) - nowhere near 100%. But I think there might be something about Norton Diskedit's way that it accessed hardware or something.

How can I troubleshoot this?

Thanks.

Evan.

 

I'm having the same problem with Diskedit on MS-DOS 6.22.

Is there a solution to this? I was going to test how to turn off the VT-x support for that virtual machine but I'm not sure how, anybody know?

 

ECS 2.x also

This may or may not be related, but eComStation version 2.0 and later also rail one core to 100% while doing nothing. Earlier versions of eComStation (1.2) and OS/2 Warp 4.5 do not have this problem. It's rather annoying as it pumps up the fan on the MacBook and burns through the battery while accomplishing nothing.